At precisely the wrong moment for Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, his microblogging service suffered an outage.

Stone appeared at South by Southwest on Tuesday afternoon for a chat about “our connected society” and “the science and nature of collaborative networks,” but anyone trying to follow the conversation on Twitter would have been lost.

During the interview — which included questions from Twitter using the hashtag #askbiz — Twitter went down for about 30 minutes. An error message on the desktop and mobile app first indicated that the site was having technical difficulties.

That message was later replaced with another that said it was down for maintenance, with an image of an ice cream cone telling a caterpillar “it’s cool. I can chill.”

The company posted a brief message acknowledging the problem and that “we’re looking into it.” A company spokesman referred request for comment to the same page.

The irony of Biz Stone talking about Twitter’s early days during an outage didn’t go unnoticed in the Twitterverse once the site was up and running:

This is the second time this month the service suffered a brief outage. Twitter went dark during the Academy Awards on March 2 soon after Ellen DeGeneres posted the ultimate celebrity selfie and challenged viewers to make the photo that included Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep the most retweeted image of all time.

Twitter has labored to improve its infrastructure in recent years after overwhelming volume caused its servers to frequently crash. Users were often met with the “fail whale,” the stock image that was issued when the site went down.